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The Uncertain Cost of Helping Illegal Immigrants Go to College

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The Uncertain Cost of Helping Illegal Immigrants Go to College

By Kirk Semple March 9, 2012 3:56 pmMarch 9, 2012 3:56 pm

Much of the public debate surrounding proposals to allow illegal immigrants to receive state financial aid for college has centered on questions of legality: Would such legislation legitimize the status of people in the country without authorization?

But lawmakers have also been puzzling over another critical matter: How much would it cost the state?

Advocates for the bill who met this week with a member of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s staff said costs seemed to weigh heavily on the minds of administration officials.

“They said once they study all the fiscal impacts, the potential impacts of the bill, they will get back to us,” said Daniela Alulema, a board member at the New York State Youth Leadership Council, one of the groups pushing for the legislation. “That’s all we were able to obtain from that meeting.”

The State Education Department estimated the cost at $627,428 per year for a measure it sent to the Legislature in December. That proposal is one of at least two circulating in Albany, commonly known as the New York State Dream Act.

The department’s bill, like the other measure, would make state tuition assistance available to illegal immigrants attending college in the state. But the Education Department’s estimate has been criticized by some analysts as unrealistically low.

Now the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in New York City, has taken a stab at the math and on Friday it published its estimates.

The report, called “The New York Dream Act: A Preliminary Estimate of Costs and Benefits,” estimates that opening the state’s Tuition Assistance Program to all students who meet the funding criteria, regardless of immigration status, would increase tuition assistance expenditures by about $17 million per year, or 2 percent.

But the report’s authors cautioned that their calculations were far from exact, especially considering that any estimate of the size of the illegal immigrant population involves guesswork.

“Given the high degree of uncertainty around numerous factors, the estimate here should be understood to be a rough approximation,” the report says.

The researchers began their number-crunching by estimating how many illegal immigrant students graduated each year from high school in New York State (3,627). This was based on work by Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, who estimated the number of illegal immigrants graduating from high school nationwide (65,000).

The researchers then used the statewide figure to estimate the number of illegal immigrants continuing on to college — and here is where their calculations diverged most significantly from the Education Department’s.

While the Education Department estimated that about 227 illegal immigrants enroll at the state’s colleges every year, the Fiscal Policy Institute researchers said the number was more likely closer to 1,777. The institute’s estimate includes students enrolled at both public and private institutions, but the overwhelming majority attend public colleges. The researchers also said that the number might rise because the availability of tuition assistance might make college more attractive to more illegal immigrants.

The institute’s researchers then assumed that most illegal immigrant students would have low family incomes and therefore qualify for the maximum amount of tuition assistance, though the researchers predicted that only about two-thirds of them would actually apply for it.

In assessing the benefits of the Dream Act, the institute concluded that a better-educated immigrant work force would result in higher salaries and, thus, higher local and state tax revenue. (The report provides a detailed analysis of these cost-benefit estimates.)

“Increasing the education level of workers also increases their productivity, and the more highly educated a state’s labor force, the more attractive is that state as a place to locate businesses,” the report says.

“Having large numbers of undocumented workers should not be considered a permanent situation: federal reform is urgently needed to fix immigration policy,” the report continues. “But gridlock at the federal level should not prevent New York State from investing in its own economy.”

John Eligon contributed reporting.

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